This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
3.7 Mapping Addresses to a struct page
There is a requirement for Linux to have a fast method of mapping virtual addresses to physical addresses and for mapping struct pages to their physical address. Linux achieves this by knowing where, in both virtual and physical memory, the global mem_map array is because the global array has pointers to all struct pages representing physical memory in the system. All architectures achieve this with very similar mechanisms, but, for illustration purposes, we will only examine the x86 carefully. This section will first discuss how physical addresses are mapped to kernel virtual addresses and then what this means to the mem_map array.
3.7.1 Mapping Physical to Virtual Kernel Addresses
As we saw in Section 3.6, Linux sets up a direct mapping from the physical address 0 to the virtual address PAGE_OFFSET at 3GiB on the x86. This means that any virtual address can be translated to the physical address by simply subtracting PAGE_OFFSET, which is essentially what the function virt_to_phys() with the macro __pa() does:
/* from <asm-i386/page.h> */
132 #define __pa(x) ((unsigned long)(x)-PAGE_OFFSET)
/* from <asm-i386/io.h> */
76 static inline unsigned long virt_to_phys(volatile void * address)
77 {
78 return __pa(address);
79 }
Obviously, the reverse operation involves simply adding PAGE_OFFSET, which is carried out by the function phys_to_virt() with the macro __va(). Next we see how this helps the mapping of struct pages to physical addresses.
There is one exception where virt_to_phys() cannot be used to convert virtual addresses to physical ones.1 Specifically, on the PPC and ARM architectures, virt_to_phys() cannot be used to convert addresses that have been returned by the function consistent_alloc(). consistent_alloc() is used on PPC and ARM architectures to return memory from non-cached for use with DMA.
3.7.2 Mapping struct pages to Physical Addresses
As we saw in Section 3.6.1, the kernel image is located at the physical address 1MiB, which of course translates to the virtual address PAGE_OFFSET + 0x00100000, and a virtual region totaling about 8MiB is reserved for the image, which is the region that can be addressed by two PGDs. This would imply that the first available memory to use is located at 0xC0800000, but that is not the case. Linux tries to reserve the first 16MiB of memory for ZONE_DMA, so the first virtual area used for kernel allocations is actually 0xC1000000. This is where the global mem_map is usually located. ZONE_DMA will still get used, but only when absolutely necessary.
Physical addresses are translated to struct pages by treating them as an index into the mem_map array. Shifting physical address PAGE_SHIFT bits to the right will treat them as a Page Frame Number (PFN) from physical address 0, which is also an index within the mem_map array. This is exactly what the macro virt_to_page() does, which is declared as follows in <asm-i386/page.h>:
#define virt_to_page(kaddr) (mem_map + (__pa(kaddr) >> PAGE_SHIFT))
The macro virt_to_page() takes the virtual address kaddr, converts it to the physical address with __pa(), converts it into an array index by bit shifting PAGE_SHIFT bits right and indexing into the mem_map by simply adding them together. No macro is available for converting struct pages to physical addresses, but, at this stage, you should see how it could be calculated.